1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a management system that manages image forming apparatuses, a control method thereof, an image forming apparatus, a control method thereof, a print system, and a non-transitory computer-readable medium. The present invention particularly relates to a technique for realizing tally processing of resource saving effects at the time of printing with an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Device management applications have been provided that manage business-use image forming apparatuses such as multifunction peripherals and printers. Such a device management application manages image forming apparatuses installed in an organization such as a company or an association and ascertains the utilization status of each image forming apparatus. Data such as when, who and how many times each function of the image forming apparatus such as copying, scanning or printing was used is recorded as job logs. The job logs are collected and tallied, which enables detailed analysis of executed jobs such as the ratio of color printing and the ratio of double-sided printing. In recent years, from the viewpoint of a reduction in a customers' TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), such device management applications are of increased importance for customers and dealers in multifunction peripherals and printers.
One of the functions of the device management application is to tally and report how much printing paper has been saved by the print settings set for print jobs such as copy jobs and print jobs in the image forming apparatus. The print settings include single-sided or double-sided printing, printing multiple pages per sheet (also referred to as N-up or N in 1 printing) that allows printing multiple pages on a single sheet of paper, and the like. A comparison is made between the number of sheets of printing paper required to print an original document to be printed with settings of single-sided printing and no N-up printing and the number of sheets of printing paper required to print the same with a setting of double-sided printing or N-up printing, and the difference is reported as a printing paper saving effect.
Also, a layout conversion function of changing the layout of a document to be printed so as to save resources such as paper and toner has been provided by applications that perform pre-printing processing. The layout conversion is a technique for recognizing a character region, a graphic region, an image region, a margin region and the like of each page of a document to be printed and re-laying out the content to be printed by deleting an unnecessary region or narrowing the margin region. Through the processing, saving effects such as reducing the number of pages of the document to be printed can be obtained.
The above technique, however, is problematic in that such a pre-printing processing application passes, to a printer driver, the content to be printed that has undergone layout conversion processing and has a reduced number of pages, and thus the image forming apparatus cannot, ascertain the data on pages saved by layout conversion processing. Accordingly, it is necessary to report the saving effects obtained by layout conversion processing of the pre-printing processing application at an application level, which differs from the report of the printing paper saving effects provided by the device management application. Also, the saving effects obtained by layout conversion processing at an application level is an estimated value, and is not an actual value with which saving is achieved until the image forming apparatus actually finishes printing of the content to be printed.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2011-242922 discloses a method in which both first reduction information obtained by print settings set in a PC and second reduction information obtained by blank removing/color reduction processing set in an image forming apparatus are recorded in a history record associated with a print job. However, the first reduction information is received from the printer driver, the second reduction information is obtained by the image forming apparatus itself, and these two pieces of information are recorded in the history record. Accordingly, it is not possible to record resource saving effects executed by an external application other than the image forming apparatus or the printer driver, and thus the above problem cannot be solved.